City Desk: Bean Town.

New York's drug of choice is caffeine. We helped invent the martini, and the Beats first shot heroin in Times Square, but the mind-bending chemical that makes New York run is caffeine, and the delivery system of choice is coffee. We drink coffee to stay up all night, our desire to do so being one of the reasons we have come to the city of darkness. But since the world, which does not share our tastes, continues to do its business during the day, we need coffee to wake up in the morning. Like most drugs, it causes a tolerance in its users, until it becomes just an internal tickle that tells us we're still alive.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war for the soul of coffee in New York. Like the civil wars that ended the Roman republic, it is a multipartite struggle.

The plainest contestant is diner-and-deli coffee. Until recently, most diners and delis were owned by Greeks. Actual Greek coffee comes close to Talleyrand's ideal recipe: "Black as the devil, hot as hell, pure as an angel, and sweet as love." But diner-and-deli coffee is an industrial product, made in aluminum urns, brown as mud, hot as a shower, pure as the Hudson, and sweet as saccharine. Philip Marlowe once asked for some coffee "made this year." He won't find it in a New York diner or deli. The only ethnic residue is the paper cups the coffee comes in, decorated with discus throwers and Parthenons. They are the last bastion of the Western canon. When the Indians who now own the diners and delis switch to pillars of Ashoka, the end will have come.

Coffee-house coffee is of variable quality. It takes its essence from its ambiance. The coffee house has been an agora of the counterculture since the Enlightenment; it is no accident that the dialogue of Rameau's Nephew by Diderot ("my thoughts, those are my pick-ups") meanders in a coffee house. Kids' coffee houses dot every town with a jacked-up community college; in the city they are a shade less willed. Here there are fewer professors showing how hip they are by going, and how professorial they are by holding forth; fewer outright slackers, more young men (somehow it is always men) in slacker professions: musicians, filmmakers. Peo ple park in coffee houses for hours with books, notebooks, and laptops; they scheme to run the world and make a few dollars; they let the axe fall on lovers, or strive mightily to put their heads on the block.

Noblest of New York's coffees is Italian. The floor of my favorite Italian coffee house is covered with small hexagonal tiles, of a kind popular at the turn of the last century; its ceiling is pressed tin. On the back wall is a tall clock in a solemn wooden case with a slow brass pendulum shaped like a lyre. On the wall is a not-bad painting of the Campagna: an aqueduct, a shepherd, a billowing cloud. The reginas- sesame cookies the size of big toes-are the best. If it is around the corner from heaven and my wife is there I will be happy. The Italian coffee house can shade into the countercultural variety because of Italians' vast hospitality, which arises from indifference. They are locked in the toils of family; outsiders, however perverse, may come and go as they please.

For years these three ruled the world of coffee. But now there is an alien fourth-Starbucks. Its rise tracks that of the pale Northwest, and of Micro soft. The principal ethnic groups of Wash ington State are those noted epicures, WASPs and Scandinavians. Talk about ice people; where is Leonard Jeffries when we need him? Like Bill Gates, Starbucks employs the innovations of others. It has taken the youth orientation of coffee-house coffee, the recipes of the Italians, and the chemical methods of the diners and delis. The latter, it must be admitted, have been vastly improved. If you are some place where the only alternative coffee is diner-and-deli-an airport, for instance-you will crawl to Starbucks as to an oasis. But New York is not an airport, it is a destination. We already have coffee that doesn't need improvement. Who has better brand loyalty? Which do you value most-variety? cleanliness? dependability? taste? The struggle is keen.

If there is a Seventh Day Adventist in the audience, he may be wondering, Why do I give my body over to pollution? He has a point. I realized the addictive power of coffee when I discovered a Mari nol/methadone substitute. There is a Brazilian berry called guarana, and a soft drink made from it of the same name. The Brazilian restaurant in my neighborhood lists the soft drink on its menu as Brazilian Energy Soda. On a whim I ordered it for the first time recently, and found it pleasant, sweet, and slightly cherry-tasting. After I finished it and my meal, I thought of my usual cafe com leite topper-but the desire was absent. Pon dering, I told my wife, who informed me that the guarana berry is stuffed with caffeine. There must be a lot of gamboling sloths in the rain forest where it grows. I had a sobering thought-I am a junkie. Maybe I should try sleeping?